CALIFORNIA—On Monday, November 30, filmmaker, author, TV commentator and Pepperdine University professor, Bruce Herschensohn passed away. The Republican U.S. Senate nominee for California was 88 years old. Herschensohn was born in Milwaukee, but raised in Los Angeles as a child.

During the 1950s, he enlisted into the Korean War, but admitted to never seeing action. After being discharged, Herschensohn went back to his old job as a messenger at RKO pictures and began his passion for filmmaking from his parents’ garage.

He began to see profit, as he was in charge of creating the training films for General Dynamics located in San Diego.

Launching his own business in 1956, Herschensohn had contracts with the United States Information agency, at which for the next 12 years he covered a variety of topics like segregation in the South, the Vietnam War, and the space program.

“I was surprised when President Johnson called me [in 1968] and asked me to be head of the Motion Picture and Television Service at USIA, I told him I was a lifelong Republican, that I had voted for Nixon in 1960 and Goldwater in ’64. He shook his head and laughed, and said he didn’t care what I was so long as [I] kept making those movies,” Herschensohn stated on Wtma.com.

Herschensohn received the second highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and became deputy special assistant to President Nixon, at the same time of the Watergate scandal.

“Washington Behind Closed Doors,” is a TV drama based on the Nixon White House, which contributed to his career as a commentator on KABC.

Between 1978-1991 Herschensohn was known for being a political commentator for both KABC-TV and KABC-Radio. He ran for senate in 1992, but lost to Barbra Boxer.

He taught “The U.S. Image Abroad” at the University of Maryland, taught foreign policy as the Nixon Chair at Whittier College, and worked with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Zurich. He served as Chairman of the Board of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, where he was a Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy and received an Honorary Doctor of Law degree.

Between 1993-2001, Herschensohn attended Claremont Institute, while attending John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard University at the same time in 1996.

“One word that defines Bruce Herschensohn: patriot,” said Hugh Hewitt, President of the Richard Nixon Foundation. “A resonant, mellifluous voice for freedom, he was always calm, always insistent on the truth that people needed to be free, wanted to be free and would be free. Though he’s no longer with us, his role as freedom’s champion will live on through his films, his writings, and his students.”